Typically, in the United States in order to play a state lottery either one physically goes to a designated state lottery agent to place a wager, or subscribes to a lottery service that plays daily or weekly their same lottery numbers for a fee.
Other known lottery systems for placing a lottery wager include the following. In the U.S. Pat. No. 4,842,278, Markowitz describes a lottery network system having individual lotteries interfaced together through to a network which processes player entries for plays in both the individual local lottery or the national lotteries. The player places bets on a lottery terminal by pressing various keys on its keyboard in response to a menu-driven screen display. In Canadian Patent No. 1,162,336, De Bruyn describes a telecommunication system adapted for processing gambling stakes for the Canadian national lottery for both French and Dutch speaking subscribers. The system is connected to a telephone exchange which answers a subscriber's call and requests lottery numbers and a wager, which the subscriber inputs by means of a selector device on the telephone. A memory device records the subscriber's telephone number, lottery numbers and the wager. A converter device then converts these numbers as stored in the memory and transmits a confirmation message in either the Dutch or French language, depending upon the telephone number, and repeats either the chosen lottery numbers and wager, or a rejection message because of a processing error.
There are other known telecommunications systems known for processing information via the telephone. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,669,730 and 4,815,741, issued to Small, teach an automatic sweepstakes game for use on automatic teller machines and point of sales terminals. U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,837, issued to Gordon, teaches a system for remote reading of utility meters to effect electronic billing. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,792,968 and 4,845,739, issued to Katz, teach a telecommunications system to elicit and process information from a subscriber, which inputs information by pressing keys on a terminal in response to a voice generator. In the Katz systems, this data is processed for statistical analysis for correlating the data inputs of various subscribers to find isolated subsets from that data.
None of the aforementioned systems allow a subscriber to call up on a touch-tone telephone, set up an account with a lottery system, place wagers in one or more lotteries available on the system, and charge the account for the wager.